Dorian's

Founding

Dorian's was founded in 1959 by four partners: Salomón Cohen Achmi; Herman Hirsh, nicknamed "Dori" and later known as Pedro Dorian; Miguel Goldstein; and Ángel García Vásquez. Cohen had opened La Marquesita, a clothing and novelty shop on Tijuana's Calle Segunda, in 1953.

According to the Tijuana businessman José Galicot, Dori had survived the Treblinka extermination camp and came to Tijuana from Los Angeles with Goldstein. With García, the two ran a store called La Bola on the site of the city's old post office. When a neighboring Chrysler dealership on Calle Segunda moved out, the four partners joined its premises to La Bola, creating the first Dorian's. The name combined "Dori" with the first two letters of Ángel and the "s" of Salomón, and the store set out to compete with the department stores across the border in San Diego.

Growth

On November 9, 1977, a fire swept through the downtown block where the store stood. Dorian's reopened after 17 working days, with half of its sales floor housed in tent-like structures in a nearby parking lot. The company's warehouse was later destroyed by a separate fire.

The chain expanded within Tijuana, including a store at the Plaza Río Tijuana mall in the Zona Río, and elsewhere in Baja California and Baja California Sur. In 1989 the group launched DAX, a chain of beauty, personal-care and household-goods stores modeled on American formats.

Under Grupo Sanborns

After a period of financial difficulty, the company was acquired in 2004 by Grupo Carso, through its subsidiary Grupo Sanborns. Carso held Dorian's Tijuana, S.A. de C.V. through Inmuebles Borgru, S.A. de C.V., itself a subsidiary of Inmuebles Carso, S.A.B. de C.V.

Grupo Sanborns had bought JCPenney's Mexican operation, six department stores in Monterrey, León, Mexico City, Chihuahua, Cancún and Mérida, in late 2003. By 2009, five of those stores, in Cancún, Chihuahua, León, Mérida and San Pedro Garza García in the Monterrey area, were operating as Dorian's.

In October 2004 Dorian's opened a store in the new Las Misiones mall in Ciudad Juárez; it was no longer among the chain's stores in 2009. In May 2005 Grupo Sanborns made its first move outside Mexico, opening a Dorian's department store alongside a Sanborns and a Mixup music store in a shopping center in El Salvador.

Conversion to Sears

In April 2009 Grupo Carso began integrating the 14 Dorian's department stores into Sears Mexico, with the stores trading under the Sears name. Not every store made the switch. The original downtown Tijuana store, at the corner of Calle Segunda and Avenida Niños Héroes, closed in May 2009. The building later became the Plaza de la Tecnología, an indoor market of small electronics and video-game vendors. In San Pedro Garza García, Plaza Fiesta San Agustín already had a Sears; the Dorian's space there was later redeveloped for restaurants and shops.

DAX was not converted. It remained part of Grupo Sanborns and later expanded beyond northern Mexico, reaching 47 stores by the third quarter of 2025.